Some of you may have noticed that a couple of our smileys stopped working, and were replaced by a large 'suspended' image. The reason for this is that some of the smileys are hosted on the personal accounts of some of the Admin team - whilst we have no issue in doing this, the terms and conditions of one or more of those hosting websites has changed, which means that a subscription would have to be paid by each member of the Admin team that have images hosted.

Much as we love you all to bits, this is not something that is viable for us to do, so I have done some work to try and mitigate things as much as I possibly can, and that is as follows:

Smileys have been split into a few more categories: The reason for doing so is two-fold; firstly, it should hopefully make it easier for you to find and use smileys. Secondly, the smileys that are likely to give us problems in the future are on the Weather, Garden & Animals and Miscellaneous tabs - if they do fall over, it allows us to handle the problem much faster and easier.

Please rest assured that every effort is being made to make alternative arrangements for these, and the aim is for us to lose none of the smileys (or as few as possible).

Testing Smileys Tab Here, I have added some smileys that are more up to date and will hopefully allow us all a bit more freedom of expression. I have endeavoured to get a decent mix, however there are a number of others available, and I appreciate that some of those chosen may not be to everyone's liking.

As you know, the Admin team work on a fully open basis, and we always try to take the opinions of our members into account, so please leave some feedback here as to whether you like the new 'test' smileys, or not as the case may be. If there is a particular smiley that you really don't like - add it to your post, and tell us why you don't like it. If enough people say they don't like a smiley, it will disappear into the digital ether.......

Also, if there is a particular type of smiley you would like to see, please give as good a description as you can, and I will try to come back with one or more options for us to try.

If the number of smilies is becoming a problem then, as far as I'm concerned, those in the 'Smilies' tab are more than enough for me (and I use them a lot) and all those in the other tabs are nice but unnecessary.

Are the ones in the 'Smilies' tab chargeable? What would be left available if all the chargeable ones were to be dropped? If it means losing a lot of them then I wouldn't mind contributing in order to keep them.

None of them are currently chargeable, and it is my aim to keep them all that way - it is outside hosting companies that are changing the goalposts on us, so it is a case of trying to be one step ahead. The ones in the smilies tab are part of the forum software as far as I know, and shouldn't be affected (please don't take this as a 100% guarantee though, as I am merely muddling my way through this, with fairly basic knowledge).

There is one other option that I am trying to explore - I actually have my own 'cloud' server, which I can access from anywhere in the world as long as I have internet; and I know for a fact that it is capable of doing the hosting that we need it to - the sticking point at the minute is that I haven't learned the required steps to make it do so. If I cannot find alternate web hosting, I will happily host it myself at no cost to GC.

The ones I have placed on the testing tab are from a relatively secure (long standing) host, who also have more to offer; I simply chose to work with their offering as it seemed to give us something new and stable at the same time.

The ones on the 'Testing' tab and the other three tabs are fine as far as I'm concerned but I'm unlikely to use them. I know others use them. I also notice that @"M" regularly uses some smilies that are not on GC but are ones that I like.

But's what more important is that this Photobucket hosting issue is also preventing images in some users posts from being displayed (NB misterq that you might be seeing your own images, but other users will only see a Photobucket image requesting subscription update - I'll add a screen shot when I'm using another device).

@Zigs All your Melplash Show images have gone, and possibly a lot more I think you need to pay Photobucket $400 if you want to display pics of your prize winning rhubarb. It seems that Photobucket has morphed into ransomware. @Fat Controller I think the whole PB hosting issue might require a thread of it's own, as it's not just smileys that are affected.

There's loads of dicussion about this on numerous forums, some people are having problems with their images and others (including me) aren't. Some have mentioned it affected their images one site but not on another, although this could be caused by what others have described, that the PB hosting message has been intermittent, appearing one day, not the next, then back again - I think that's just when posting new PB hosted images as they've said the message remained on their earlier posts.

Anybody going to pay the $400? I dont use Photobucket any more, but I'm going to use it even less now!